A limited constitutional government calls for a rules-based, freemarket monetary system, not the topsy-turvy fiat dollar that now exists under central banking. This issue of the Cato Journal examines the case for alternatives to central banking and the reforms needed to move toward free-market money.

The more widespread use of body cameras will make it easier for the American public to better understand how police officers do their jobs and under what circumstances they feel that it is necessary to resort to deadly force.

Americans are finally enjoying an improving economy after years of recession and slow growth. The unemployment rate is dropping, the economy is expanding, and public confidence is rising. Surely our economic crisis is behind us. Or is it? In Going for Broke: Deficits, Debt, and the Entitlement Crisis, Cato scholar Michael D. Tanner examines the growing national debt and its dire implications for our future and explains why a looming financial meltdown may be far worse than anyone expects.

The Cato Institute has released its 2014 Annual Report, which documents a dynamic year of growth and productivity. “Libertarianism is not just a framework for utopia,” Cato’s David Boaz writes in his book, The Libertarian Mind. “It is the indispensable framework for the future.” And as the new report demonstrates, the Cato Institute, thanks largely to the generosity of our Sponsors, is leading the charge to apply this framework across the policy spectrum.

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Topic: Law and Civil Liberties

ABC News reports that the Bush administration may be on the verge of closing Guantanamo. This is because the recent Boumediene ruling will be bringing judicial scrutiny to the facility. In other words, from the standpoint of Bush administration lawyers, if the law pertaining to habeas corpus is coming to Guantanamo Bay, it may be time to get out of Dodge! Quick, move the prisoners to places where the judiciary can’t find them. This might be called the “executive flight privilege” because when a person (who is not in the employment of the state) tries to evade the course of justice by leaving town to avoid arrest or the institution or continuance of legal proceedings, prosecutors say it is unlawful flight.

One of the hazards of running a grassroots campaign is that sometimes those grassroots supporters raise a ruckus if you don’t live up to your primary campaign promises. The New York Timesreports that 7000 of Obama’s supporters (the number is up to 13,000 as I write this) have created a group on Obama’s own campaign website to pressure him to reject the “compromise” FISA legislation that the House passed last month. Obama declared his opposition to any FISA legislation that included retroactive immunity back in February, and many of Obama’s liberal supporters feel betrayed that while he is still nominally against the immunity provision, he has signaled a willingness to support the overall legislation whether or not the immunity provision is stripped out.

Not surprisingly, the Obama campaign’s response is both lame and misleading:

Greg Craig, a Washington lawyer who advises the Obama campaign, said Tuesday in an interview that Mr. Obama had decided to support the compromise FISA legislation only after concluding it was the best deal possible.

“This was a deliberative process, and not something that was shooting from the hip,” Mr. Craig said. “Obviously, there was an element of what’s possible here. But he concluded that with FISA expiring, that it was better to get a compromise than letting the law expire.”

I feel like a broken record, but FISA, which was enacted in 1978 and updated in 2001, doesn’t expire. It will remain the law of the land indefinitely, whether or not Congress passes new legislation this month. The Protect America Act, which was passed last August, has already expired – back in March. As I pointed out at the time, the expiration of the PAA simply returned us to the permissive surveillance regime that Congress enacted with the Patriot Act in 2001. That regime isn’t perfect, to be sure, but it leaves our intelligence community with plenty of tools to spy on terrorists.

What Mr. Craig is most likely referring to is the fact that the first surveillance “authorizations” under the PAA will begin expiring in August. These “authorizations” are good for a year, so any authorizations approved in August 2007 will expire in August 2008. But that simply means that intelligence officials will have to apply for a FISA order under the still fairly permissive Patriot Act rules. Those rules include a lower legal threshold than exists under ordinary criminal wiretaps, and an “emergency” provision allowing wiretapping to begin immediately and authorization to be sought after the fact. The net result will be a modest increase in the NSA’s paperwork burden, but there’s no reason to think any reasonable surveillance activities will cease. (Some indiscriminate vacuum-cleaner surveillance may have to be stopped, but that wouldn’t be a bad thing)

Indeed, Pres. Bush himself praised the changes Congress made to FISA in the wake of the September 11 attacks, noting that the Patriot Act’s FISA amendments “will allow surveillance of all communications used by terrorists, including e-mails, the Internet, and cell phones” and makes the intelligences community “able to better meet the technological challenges posed by this proliferation of communications technology.” That’s the legal regime that will apply if Congress declines to enact a FISA bill this year. There hasn’t been a major terrorist attack on American soil in the six and a half years that legal regime has been in place. Surely it will serve us well enough for another six and a half month until Obama himself is likely to be sitting in the Oval Office and can negotiate a FISA reform more consistent with his supposed liberal principles.

Judge Renee R. Roth of Surrogate’s Court in Manhattan will also play a role. She has already demonstrated a willingness to be flexible, cutting the size of Trouble’s trust fund to $2 million, from the $12 million prescribed in Mrs. Helmsley’s will, and ordering that the difference be added to the pending charitable trust.

Judge Roth also agreed to a settlement between the trustees and two of Mrs. Helmsley’s grandchildren who were explicitly left out of her will. The agreement gave those grandchildren $6 million each.

It’s easy to let Helmsley’s interest in dogs distract us from what Judge Roth has done here. But consider this: If this judicial interference can happen to someone who can afford the best law firm in the USA to arrange her estate, what’s to stop some state official from messing with your property? I had to endure a semester of “Trusts and Estates” during law school and I’m sorry to report that what Judge Roth has done is fairly common. Wills can be “adjusted” according to the “flexibility” of the executor and the judge.

Bush Administration appointees involved with issues such as the Iraq war and coercive interrogation of suspected terrorists probably don’t spend much time thinking about international tax policy, but they may rue the day that the Justice Department decided to persecute Swiss banks and Swiss bankers for obeying Swiss law and protecting the financial privacy of customers. What’s the connection? By going after Swiss banks and Swiss bankers in hopes of finding a few Americans who might be hiding money from the IRS, the Justice Department is embracing the notion that governments should not be constrained by national boundaries and national laws. Richard Rahn already has an excellent piece explaining why this is an absurd policy, but let’s consider some of the broader implications.

What if John Yoo or Donald Rumsfeld travel to Europe in the near future for business or personal reasons and some European government decides to throw them in jail for violating “international law”? This may sound fanciful, but German authorities already have moved in this direction by asserting universal jurisdiction, and it doesn’t take much imagination to foresee politically ambitious officials from other nations grabbing the baton. The Wall Street Journalreport does not cover these broader implications, but it is a good summary of the Justice Department’s fishing expedition:

The Justice Department, in an unprecedented move against a foreign bank, is seeking to force UBS AG to turn over the names of wealthy U.S. clients who allegedly used the giant Swiss bank to avoid taxes. …U.S. authorities have been holding discussions for several weeks with UBS and Swiss banking authorities to identify the U.S. account holders. People familiar with the talks say UBS officials floated the possibility that the U.S. could obtain the names through a request to Swiss regulators. Monday’s federal court filing instead puts the bank in direct conflict with the U.S. government. …The filing is the first against a non-U.S. bank by the Justice Department using what it calls a “John Doe summons,” a maneuver typically used to investigate tax fraud by people whose identities are unknown. The move could spark a major legal battle because the Justice Department is essentially gambling that courts will bless the move when it’s directed at a company with extensive U.S. operations but that isn’t based in the U.S.

Today’s ruling recognizes that gun ownership is a fundamental right – sacred, just as the right to free speech and assembly.

You can’t get much stronger than that. Except … wait … what was it McCain said about our sacred right to free speech? Oh, right, two years ago on the Don Imus show he said, “I would rather have a clean government than one where quote First Amendment rights are being respected, that has become corrupt.” So when McCain says that our Second Amendment rights are just as fundamental and sacred as our First Amendment rights, maybe he’s pulling a bait-and-switch. Because he’s thoroughlyindifferent to the First Amendment.

In his statement on the Heller decision McCain went on to say, “This ruling does not mark the end of our struggle against those who seek to limit the rights of law-abiding citizens. We must always remain vigilant in defense of our freedoms.”

It’s not one of the big cases decided by the Supreme Court this term, but Indiana v. Edwards shows how these justices are all over the map – from a libertarian legal perspective. The issue was whether a person can choose to represent himself in court in a criminal case. This corner of the law was in pretty good shape – the rule that courts followed was this: If the defendant knowingly and voluntarily waives the right to counsel, he can proceed to defend himself (so long as he is orderly and follows the judge’s rules as all attorneys must do). Some liberals object and say he’ll just screw up and the trial will not be fair. The response has been that the trial judge should warn the defendant about such risks at the outset, but it’s his case, his liberty on the line, and thus his decision.

This term presented the case of a mentally ill defendant who wanted to represent himself. The trial judge denied his request. Some persons are found to be mentally incompetent to stand trial – even with an attorney’s help – but that was not the case here. The defendant was found to be competent to stand trial but, according to the trial judge, incompetent to represent himself. Counsel was appointed and he was subsequently convicted by a jury. He appealed his case all the way to the Supreme Court, which affirmed the lower court’s handling of the case. Interestingly, Justice Scalia filed a dissenting opinion (which Justice Thomas joined).

Excerpt:

In my view the Constitution does not permit a State to substitute its own perception of fairness for the defendant’s right to make his own case before the jury–a specific right long understood as essential to a fair trial. … [T]he loss of ‘dignity’ the right is designed to prevent is not the defendant’s making a fool of himself by presenting an amateurish or even incoherent defense. Rather, the dignity at issue is the supreme human dignity of being master of one’s fate rather than a ward of the State–the dignity of individual choice. …

The facts of this case illustrate this point with the utmost clarity. Edwards wished to take a self-defense case to the jury. His counsel preferred a defense that focused on lack of intent. Having been denied the right to conduct his own defense, Edwards was convicted without having had the opportunity to present to a jury the grounds he believed supported his innocence. I do not doubt that he likely would have been convicted anyway. But to hold that a defendant may be deprived of the right to make legal arguments for acquittal simply because a state-selected agent has made a different argument on his behalf is, as Justice Felix Frankfurter wrote, to ‘imprison a man in his privileges and call it the Constitution.’ In singling out mentally ill defendants for this treatment, the Court’s opinion does not even have the questionable virtue of being politically correct. At a time when all society is trying to mainstream the mentally impaired, the Court permits them to be deprived of a basic constitutional right–for their own good.

Good stuff.

The liberal votes here are probably driven by their pursuit of a ‘just’ outcome – no matter what the constitutional text says. Justice Kennedy recently joined the liberals in defense of habeas corpus and the conservatives in defense of the right to keep and bear arms. One might have expected him to follow the text here as well – but he joined the majority. Alas, he seems to pursue the ‘just’ outcome just like the liberals. That Alito and Roberts would part company with Scalia and Thomas in a case like this shows once again their more statist bent.